I think I find this story so funny because it accidentally underscores how divided into classes the supposedly egalitarian Great Britain still is...or maybe it's because it's so clear someone forgot to do enough quality-assurance testing.

The story goes like this: a professor from Birmingham University named Martin Russell has been working for years on a satellite navigation system that uses voice-activation instead of the usual button-pushing to activate its programming. He released the system...and discovered it didn't work for certain people because the software couldn't recognize accents from anywhere but southern England. To fix the problem, Professor Russell is now recording volunteers from Wales, northern England and Scotland, but now the word is out and one politician branded Russell's research team a group of "soft, southern idiots." Aren't accents fun?